l? THE A ; NEW YOIl Kl í ," k ' '" H m m t'ï'/íf\ ---- æ rro It ml 111\\\\\ *. o '\: 0 0 . Q , . '"'6 'r. THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment W E were interested to learn from the Times the other day that the United States not only is currently outselling all other govern- ments in the international weapons market but is moving the merchandise in a principled, discriminating manner. This country's sales last year grossed one and a half billion dollars, the Times man was told by a high gov- ernment official, but it isn't just any customer who can buy American how- itzers and tanks. "Frequently," we read, "the United States has refused to sell arms to a relatively undeveloped country in order not to contribute to a weakening of its economy." And al- most as frequently, we gathered, it costs the government's sales force an effort to adhere to this policy, for, according to the same official, the leaders of such countries have "gone away mad" when o their requests for arms were turned down. It seems to us that, like most vir- tuous acts, the solicitousness of the gov- ernment's sales policy transcends itself. Besides demonstrating concern for the economies of undeveloped countries, we think, it has the effect of preserving the military pecking order. How pushy do the leaders of undeveloped countries imagine they can get? Just because they yearn for submarines and rockets doesn't mean they can have them. Some rules have to obtain if the old values are to be honored, and the least of the prerequisites, our government in- sists, is a sound, pliable economy that can take weapons bills in stride. Until these undeveloped countries develop a sem- blance of prosperity, they can rusticate in peace. We hope the government stands firm, no matter how mad it makes the leaders of undeveloped coun- tries. Relax the rules just slightly, we say, and the first thing anyone knows, these upstart nations will try to fi- nagle their way into the Nuclear Club itself. W ITH Great Britain in the process of changing over to the metric system from the so-called English sys- tem of weights and measures, we ex- pect that before long the United States, as the only major non-metric holdout in the West, will have to conform, too. Global science and international enter- prise must be served. However, we can't help being concerned about what the changeover will do to the language. As far as we can see, it will force into retirement a number of our hardiest Anglo-Saxon expressions, offering, at best, cold, Latinate comfort in the way of replacement. A few old reliables may just manage to adapt themselves. For instance, "All wool and a metre wide" we might be able to live with, restively, but somehow a miss will never seem as good to us as a kilometre. To describe a short person as a quarter-litre, rather than a half-pint, will perhaps be the kinder thing, but only because the sub- stitute tag falls unevocatively flat. Fur- thermore, we are willing to bet that "I came within a centimetre of being killed" will not be quite the conversa- tion-stopper that its prototype was. Would Shakespeare ever have had Shy- lock demand half a kilogram of flesh? And what will poor Peter Piper pick in the future? Then, there are the melan- choly prospects of the inchworm. What place for him in God's Little Hectare? Compatible T HE New York Stock Exchange has recently automated its stock- quotation service to brokerage offices, the purpose of which is to give, by voice, over private telephone wires, the per- tinent current statistics on any listed stock that the inquiring broker wants to know about. (One should not confuse the stock-quotation service with the more familiar ticker, which records completed trades by teleprinter on paper tape, rather than by voice.) The voices used to be those of a covey of girls who sat at a switchboard on the fifteenth floor of the Exchange's building, at 11 Wall Street; now the voice in all cases is that of a young I.B.M. engineer named Robert Rew, which is stored in a drum inside a computer on the third floor of the building, and we propose to recount a talk we had recently with Mr. Rew and his wife, Lois, about how they turned his voice into that of a computer. We met the Rews, both of whom are tall and handsome, in a room at 11 Wall that contained a phone hooked up to the newly modernized quotation service, and the first thing we did was pick up the phone and dial the numbers of a few stocks-there's a different number for each one-to hear what the mechanized man, or the humanized machine, sounded like. His, or its, vo- cabulary amounts to a hundred and twenty-six words, nearly all of which are letters, numbers, and fractions, and the voice comes across in a jerky yet methodical way that sounded to us ex- actly like the voices of robots in movies Q C ) .. 'I made when real talking robots were still a dream. That is to say, nature is ap- parently up to its old trick of imitating art, and computers are being taught to talk as computers ought to talk. After hanging up on Rew the com- puter voice, we asked the real Mr. and Mrs. Rew to tell us the story of their project. "I work for I.B.M. up in Pough- keepsie, and in May, 1961, I was as- signed the job of developing these voice recordings for the Stock Exchange,"